To ER Is Human

"Over the years your bodies become walking autobiographies, telling friends and strangers alike of the minor and major stresses of your lives." Mayilyn Ferguson

After days of recurring chest pain, shortness of breath, racing pulse, and high BP, I finally went to the ER. They ran a host of cardiac tests, gave me some Nitropaste, a shot of Morphine, and decided to keep me overnight for "observation", which apparently means warehousing me in an uncomfortable bed while half a dozen nurses talk, LOUDLY, right outside my room.

It is entirely impossible to sleep in hospital.

When I finally decided, at three fifteen, to stop trying to sleep and do some reading (I'd thought ahead and brought a book) five minutes after I cranked the bed to its upright position and turned on the light, the power went out.

Yeah. Blackout at the hospital. Emergency lights were on in the hallway.

Found out later that the hospital was having a new computer system installed so they cut non-essential power for two hours during the night shifts.

Can you believe they do not have 24 hour room service in hospitals? Really. Savages, all of them.

On the good side, my heart does not appear to be damaged. On the bad side, my doc is blaming the whole incident on "emotional stress and musculoskeletal pain".

So, my pain was caused by pain. Well, that clears it up nicely, don't you think?

As for the emotional stress, well, that's a shocker. Stress, I'm not stressed. (Insert hysterical laughter here)

At 6:30 I began fasting for tomorrow's stress test. Even though the doc told me there was nothing wrong with my heart, he still ordered a stress test. Hmmm. CYA? Or are we perhaps not so sure? If there's nothing wrong with my heart, why do I need a stress test?

One of the doctors in the ER launched into a speech about how I just had to let things go and relax. Ahem. He was Indian, and proceeded to tell me about the rampant poverty in his "part of the world." I nearly grabbed him by the tie and asked, "So what are you saying, that all the shit that's going on in my life is my fucking KARMA and I should just 'let it go' and accept it?" I should have told him I was moments away from violating my vow of ahimsa and bitch-slapping him.

Forgive me for being stressed and concerned about a nearly impossible schedule, no employment, looming foreclosure, my dying grandmother, my failing marriage, my laundry list of health problems.

Oy.

When I told him I had a brain injury, this same doctor said, "Really? How do you know?" I almost slapped him again.

I know that people who didn't know me before the accident usually can't tell that I have anything wrong with me. That doesn't mean it didn't happen. That doesn't mean I don't have problems. No doubt most of the people he sees in the ER can't spell their own names, however, I was incredibly annoyed by his question.

"Did you lose consciousness in the accident?" he asked. Duh. YEAH. And then I let loose with the list of issues resulting from the injury: aphasia, concentration difficulties, executive function problems, personality changes, vision changes, a Central Auditory Processing problem, oh, yeah, and, by the way, my IQ dropped two standard deviations. "Yeah, Doc," I wanted to say, "I know you know what that meas. Luckily I was smart to start with so I'm still probably as smart as you are now." Ugh.

See, that's my anger management problem - also one of the many MTBI symptoms. Well, that one might be a sign. You know the difference, right? Symptoms are self-reported, "signs" are observable by others. Thus, my anger could be considered both a sign and a symptom.

So I spent the night on the Cardiac Floor listening to the loud nurses talking about glitter tattoos and how one of them has ducks and her ducks are so fat this year because they're eating all the bugs, and there are so many bugs this year that the ducks aren't bothering to eat any of the duck food because they're just eating the bugs. This, loudly, at four in the morning, is not what you want to hear while trying to sleep in a profoundly uncomfortable bed, which is stuck in the upright position, so you're curled up like a lima bean in the valley of the bed trying to find a position that both blocks your ears and accommodates the cardiac monitor and the IV line and the O2 getup.

For tonight I think that's probably enough bitching from me. Bed is calling me. Tonight, I'm getting some sleep. 6 am is gonna come mighty early.